By Mindful Magazine on Wednesday, December 10, 2014

The holidays can be both a joyful and chaotic time of year. Families get together—a lovely experience, but when we’re hosting relatives and coordinating gift exchanges, a sense of obligation can crowd out some of our jollier feelings. There’s often so much doing that we don’t make time for being together.

Here are a few simple ways you can mindfully plan your holidays and spread feelings of kindness and compassion liberally this season:Have A Mindful PotluckCutting down on cooking is not a cop out. Extending the invitation to family and friends to bring their favorite recipes into your home is a great conversation starter—after all, we all have a few recipes passed down to us from our grandparents. Potlucks also cut down on worries you might have about guests not enjoying the food. You can extend your generosity a bit further by coordinating your potluck with the fundraising efforts of local food organizations.Dodge The DogfightsGetting together with relatives can be a real joy, but it can also create many challenges. There are lots of unspoken expectations about the holidays. And sometimes when we visit relatives, we feel like we’re a teenager again and not an adult. And the personalities! When with family, stick to topics you can all agree on.

Have A Gift-Light HolidayFor some of us, giving gifts is as essential as the star on the top of the tree. But the stress of looking for the right “thing” can eclipse actually seeing and talking to the people we’re buying for. Happiness can’t be wrapped up in a bow. Instead of obsessing over what to get someone, consider that the perfect gift might be your presence. You can also give a gift as a family: do some volunteer work together, or take some time at the year’s end to send donations to organizations you care about.

By practicing a few of these quick-and-simple suggestions, you can make the most of your family time—and holiday time—this winter.

Visit mindful.org for feature articles or to subscribe to the magazine in print or digital format. Happy holidays!

By Mindful Magazine on Wednesday, November 19, 2014

​It’s time to rest up for the holidays.

This time of year, we are often so busy that we can’t do what we’d really like to do: appreciate one another, give thanks, celebrate. Instead, we’ve built a long to-do list, our usual routines are disrupted, and we get less sleep than usual.

It’s a perfect recipe for boosted stress levels. So here are three suggestions to help keep you on an even keel over the holidays:

1. For five minutes, four times a day, stop briefly.It’s a simple way to practice just being instead of doing. Bring your attention to your own breath and body in the moment, just as they are. And no need to think about your to-do list—guaranteed, it will be there when you’re done.

2. Try forgoing a few invitations this year. And don’t be shy about ducking out of parties early. You might be surprised at the extra time you’ll find for yourself, not to mention feeling like you’re securely in the driver’s seat of your own life.

3. Spread compassion around liberally this season (and all other times of the year), and direct a bit of that holiday spirit your own way, too. Especially if you overcook the turkey or don’t get someone the “perfect” gift!

These three tips offer just a taste of the many ways you can breathe, relax, and make the most of the holiday season. For more information about mindfulness, or to subscribe to Mindful Magazine in print or digital format, visit mindful.org.

By Mindful Magazine on Tuesday, October 28, 2014

​Mindfulness is not only about sitting still and reflecting inward. Getting up and moving, while still maintaining mindful attention, can turn your focus more outward, getting you out of our head and into your body—and the world around you. Perking up your awareness even a little as you move through the world can enrich your daily experience and anchor you during emotional storms. Steady practice can enable you to manage increased intensity—a difficult conversation, a crisis, a challenging campaign—more skillfully. Instead of responding to highly charged situations by tensing up your body, you can learn to handle things with more ease and grace.

Here are a few ways you can take mindfulness with you the next time you’re heading into the great (or just everyday) outdoors:

When You’re Outside

Whether you’re perched on your front step with your morning coffee or heading to a specific destination, there’s an opportunity to take in your surroundings. Stop for a moment and see if you can take in all of the senses, one by one: sight, sound, taste, feel, smell. What colors are the leaves? If they’re falling through the air, watch them. What can you hear around you as everyone gets ready for the day? It might be the hum of traffic getting louder or children chatting as they walk to school. You might notice the coolness of the breeze on your cheeks or the smell of the air. Take stock of the different elements at play around you.

When You’re Walking

Walking is a great opportunity to tune into what’s happening in your body. When you’re walking—to lunch, to the car, to the bus—change your pace. Walk half as fast. You can try this mini-walking practice:

Step out with your left foot. Feel it swing, and feel your heel hit the ground, followed by the ball of your foot, and your toes. Then feel the same as your right foot comes forward. Keep your attention on the movement: heel, sole, toes, lift. This helps you connect the action of walking to the present moment.

When You’re Commuting

Commuting can often feel like a transition period that’s all about anxiously waiting to get to the next place—including rushing to get home to relax! To counteract the rushing mentality—which is unsafe in any case—do something to ground you in your place. In the car, notice how the steering wheel feels in your hands, your posture as you sit. Take a few deep breaths before you start the ignition. If you’re on the bus, feel the vibrations of the bus through the soles of your feet as the bus accelerates and decelerates.

If you can walk to or from work, even if only for part of your commute, do it. If you find your thoughts, and your body, rushing, a helpful phrase to remember is: “go elephant.” Walk S L O W L Y. Feel your feet on the ground. Gaze easy and level. Feel the heaviness of your feet on the ground in juxtaposition to your racing thoughts.

By Mindful Magazine on Thursday, September 11, 2014

​Mindful eating is not directed by charts, tables, pyramids, or scales. It is not dictated by an expert. It is directed by your own inner experiences, moment by moment. Your experience is unique, making you the expert. In the process of learning to eat mindfully, we replace self-criticism with self-nurturing, anxiety with curiosity, and shame with respect for your own inner wisdom.

In this post, I will discuss a crucial method for savoring all the tastes and smells of the delicious foods you eat—by practicing relaxed, patient, mindful eating.

Mindfulness Is the Best Flavoring

As I write this I am eating a lemon tart that a friend gave to me. After writing for a few hours I’m ready to reward myself with a tart. The first bite is delicious. Creamy, sweet-sour, melting. When I take the second bite, I think about what to write next. The flavor in my mouth decreases. I take another bite and get up to sharpen a pencil. As I walk, I notice I am chewing, but there is almost no lemon flavor in this third bite. I sit down, get to work, and wait a few minutes.

Then I take a fourth bite, fully focused on the smells, tastes, and touch sensations in my mouth. Delicious, again! I discover, all over again (I’m a slow learner), that the only way to keep that “first bite” experience, to honor the gift my friend gave me, is to eat slowly, with long pauses between bites. If I do anything else while I’m eating—if I talk, walk, write, or even think—the flavor diminishes or disappears. The life is drained from my beautiful tart. I could be eating the cardboard box.

Here’s the humorous part. I stopped tasting the lemon tart because I was thinking. About what? Mindful eating! Discovering that, I grin. To be a human being is both pitiful and funny.

Why can’t I think, walk, and be aware of the taste of the tart at the same time? I can’t do all these at once because the mind has two distinct functions: thinking and awareness. When the thinking is turned up, the awareness is turned down. When the thinking function is going full throttle, we can eat an entire meal, an entire cake, an entire carton of ice cream, and not taste more than a bite or two. When we don’t taste, we can end up stuffed to the gills but feeling completely unsatisfied. This is because the mind and mouth weren’t present, weren’t tasting or enjoying, as we ate. The stomach became full but the mind and mouth were unfulfilled and continued calling for us to eat.

If we don’t feel satisfied, we’ll begin to look around for something more or something different to eat. Everyone has had the experience of roaming the kitchen, opening cupboards and doors, looking vainly for something, anything, to satisfy. The only thing that will cure this, a fundamental kind of hunger, is to sit down and be, even for a few minutes, wholly present.

If we eat and stay connected with our experience and with the people who grew and cooked the food, who served the food, and who eat alongside us, we will feel most satisfied, even with a meager meal. This is the gift of mindful eating, to restore our sense of satisfaction no matter what we are or are not eating.

But the biggest gap occurred during work, as mind-wandering is an epidemic on the job. Thankfully, we can take steps that will help us stay on task when it matters most. Here’s how:

1. Manage our temptations.

Many of the distractors that pull us away from what we’re working on are digital: tweets, emails, and the like. But now, several internet apps can help reduce the temptation to wander off. Google Chrome offers two free apps that do this: Nanny for Google, which blocks off websites we might be tempted to visit for a custom length of time, and StayFocusd, which limits the amount of time we can spend in our inbox, on Facebook, or wherever else we might be seduced away.

2. Monitor our mind and take second thoughts.

Noticing where our minds have gone – checking our twitter feed instead of working on that report – gives us the chance for a second thought: “my mind has wandered off again.” That very thought disengages our brain from where it has wandered and activates brain circuits that can help our attention get unstuck and return to the work at hand.

3. Practice a daily mindfulness session.

This mental exercise can be as simple as watching our breath, noticing when our mind has wandered off, letting go of the wandering thought, and bringing it back to our breath again. These movements of the mind are like a mental workout, the equivalent of repetitions in lifting free weights; every rep strengthens the muscle a bit more. In mindfulness, the brain’s circuits get stronger for noticing when our mind has wandered, letting go, and returning to our chosen focus. And that’s just what we need to stay on task.

- Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence and Focus

Mindful will return in September with their next guest post. In the meantime, visit mindful.org for feature articles or to subscribe to the magazine in print or digital format.